Updated occasionally…

Ayn Rand Responds To Obama’s Inaugural Call For Collectivism

January 25, 2013

Few people in media would dispute the suggestion that Obama’s second inaugural speech was a shout out to the benefits of big government. Many fans and detractors of the president have cited the speech as an argument for collectivism.

Socialism: Tuesday’s inaugural address included a big dollop of “give capitalism its due.” But it was just a spoonful of sugar to help Americans swallow their collectivist medicine.

America is on “a never-ending journey,” President Obama declared, using a metaphor that makes sense for the biggest-spending chief executive in the history of mankind; never-ending journeys never run into a Day of Reckoning.

According to this president, “being true to our founding documents … does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way.” Liberty, we are to believe, is an eye-of-the-beholder proposition.

This is what we are to have in mind as we swallow the “ask not what your country” line of Obama’s address: “preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”

In other words, there is no real liberty without big government. Or perhaps we should turn to Orwell’s 1984 to break the code: “Freedom Is Slavery.”

In 1959, author and philosopher Ayn Rand was interviewed by Mike Wallace. Her warnings of American collectivism ring as true today as they did then.